Our mission is to join individuals and groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a rational, sustainable world.
When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will become unthinkable.
War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to ending war is ending corporate control of the US government.
All social justice efforts lead to the end of war, the ultimate injustice. Those who work for justice are Soldiers For Peace.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2014

WHY A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO END CITIZENS UNITED IS INEVITABLE

It is amazing how hard some people will work to convince others that doing what
is absolutely necessary is impossible. Imagine if most people chose to believe
that it is too late to do anything about climate change. Even if they were right,
doing nothing due to widespread acceptance of the idea would amount to humanity
turning its back on its children, dooming
them to live through the collapse of human civilization. As another example, the biggest obstacle to
global peace is arguably the widespread acceptance of the self-fulfilling prophecy
that war is inevitable. What if it became commonly understood that war is
always a choice and they only benefit the corporations of the
military-industrial complex that essentially dictates foreign policy to decision-makers
in Washington? It is possible that war would become unthinkable, if we are
willing to make that happen.

Global climate change and global peace, like nearly every issue that Congress
and the White House have failed to address, are problems for all but the few
who pay for the elections of our representatives in Washington. Congress and
the White House routinely put the immediate interests of corporations over
those of the rest of us. The short-sighted approach of the Wall Street
criminals who dominate the government is setting the US and global economies up
for a fall that will make 2008 look like a mild downturn. The economic devastation
would leave us woefully unprepared to deal with the human crisis that would
result. Well-respected experts
like Helen Brown are warning us to prepare for a state of permanent martial law
in the wake of the coming economic collapse.

The problem then is that until we change the US system of campaign finance,
there is little hope for human civilization. There is a large and growing
movement to do so through the only means that a corrupt Supreme Court has left
us, a constitutional amendment. You would think that the recent 54-42 vote in
the Senate would have caused naysayers some pause, but that does not seem to be
the case. A recent
article in Alternet made the claim that this meant the movement “collapsed
with a predictable thud,” overlooking the fact that the vote itself was a
historic milestone on the path to the inevitable enactment of an amendment that
will be the first giant step toward establishing democracy in the US since the
constitution itself.

What casual observers of the amendment movement consistently fail to recognize
is that there is a specific path to passage that should be obvious to anyone
who thinks through the problem of getting a corrupt Congress to pass an
amendment that will undercut the very system that got most of its members into
office. Any solution will clearly need
to involve making support for an amendment a crucial campaign issue in
Congressional elections. If voters can be made to use this issue as a litmus
test for their support, we can and will elect a Congress that will pass an
amendment. Such a Congress will have proven that it is willing to put the
interests of its constituents over those of the corporate patrons of the
current occupants of Congress. Then, they can get on to dealing with other
aspects of corruption that critics of the amendment complain it would not
address.

Movement leaders can take much of the blame for the failure of recognition of
this clear path to victory. The idea has been floating around since before
Citizens United was decided, as the Roberts Court’s call for briefs that would
expand the original question to gut campaign finance reform made it obvious which
way it was going to come down. After the decision, some of us immediately got to
work promoting not just wider awareness of the problem, but recognition of the
solution. Unfortunately, early supporters gave up on the strategy after the 2010
election failed to yield results. This was surprising, given that the lack of
success in electing candidates pledged to support an amendment was predictable.
Not only was the idea new, but organizers failed to achieve buy-in from many groups
working on the issue. Move to Amend, which had the most boots on the ground
early in the battle, rejected the idea outright and refused to work with any
group that did not support the amendment they wrote or their strategy to see it
passed.

In 2010, Public Citizen issued a call for pledges to support an amendment that
would overrule Citizens United. I was one of dozens of candidates for the House
and Senate who answered the call. We will never know how many more candidates
might have been willing to take the pledge had it received wider publicity
through other groups working on the issue and the “alternative” media that
treated it as just one issue among many rather than the central problem halting
progress on addressing the rest. People for the American Way was Public
Citizens’ only partner. Its role was confined to mentioning the campaign on its
website and listing candidates who had made a pledge. Despite an
effort to revive interest in the idea in 2012 and the ease with which
pledges were obtained, another four years passed before the idea finally began
to catch on.

In 2012, both Public Citizen and People for the American Way declined to
continue what came to be most widely known as the Pledge to Amend campaign,
despite the obvious fact that it was a strategy that could only succeed over
several election cycles. The same was true for other groups that were
approached. Most of them did not seem to appreciate the significance of the
idea. Although Pledge to Amend
is the name of the same strategy recently adopted by Move to Amend, its
steering committee explicitly rejected the idea in 2012 as premature whenever the
question came up. Move to Amend is now calling for people to solicit pledges of
support for an amendment that would reform campaign finance and abolish
corporate constitutional rights (corporate personhood), but there is little
evidence that their local affiliates around the country have responded. As a
result, it appears that another election cycle is likely to be wasted.

The earliest serious effort to organize a movement around the idea of making
support for an amendment a campaign issue seems to have started in Oregon in
2014. In 2013, various groups around the state came together in a successful
effort to get an amendment resolution passed in the state legislature. By 2014,
they were looking for another project. At that time, the national steering
committee of Move to Amend had failed to provide strong leadership in giving
local affiliates around the country a new objective once those who had worked
passed amendments in their communities had succeeded. They suggested working on
getting pledges from state legislators, seemingly ignoring the fact that the
amendment had to pass Congress first. The Oregon Democracy Coalition
decided to pursue what they call the Ask the Candidate strategy, first suggested
by Public Citizen in 2010.

The effort is off to a slow start, but is likely to serve as a model for groups
around the US by the time of the 2016 election. It is based on the idea of forming
local groups in every community and empowering them to raise awareness of the
issue of corruption and the way to address it in ways of their own choosing. The
coalition has quickly grown from its original six members (considering all of the
Move to Amend locals in the state as one group) to 29. It is reaching out to public interest
organizations in the environmental, peace, economic justice, labor and other
movements that have largely been working in isolation. All of these groups are
realizing that their efforts will be fruitless until we have a government that
puts our interests over the corporate patrons of our so-called representatives.
While there have been dozens of other strategies proposed that merit support,
none have the momentum of the movement to amend the constitution.

As the alternative media and activists nationwide increasingly become aware of
the central role of reforming campaign finance in moving America forward, the model
used by the Oregon Democracy Coalition is likely to become the nucleus of a
truly grassroots movement for an amendment in communities around the country.
It might even just become the way that we finally build the fabled “progressive
movement” that cynics have written off as impossible to achieve.

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OUR GOAL: The eradication of war by restoring democracy in America.

OUR MISSION: To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their plutocratic sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations and those who control them to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.

THE PROBLEM: is not that the American government does not work. It works fine for those who own it, just not for the people of America. It is corporate control of Congress that permits the enslavement of Peoples of other nations and ultimately, Americans as well.

Now that the global economic elite are bringing their tools of subjugation to the United States, we must fight back together to ensure that the hope of government of the People, by the People and for the People does not perish from the Earth.

Together, we can mend the social fabric of a broken nation and assure liberty and justice for all the Peoples of the planet we share.

War and lack of health care are symptoms of the same disease: corporate control of the US government. That is why we must take back America for the people by working to pass a Constitutional amendment to get corporate money out of elections and abolish corporate personhood. This is the essential first step to creating true representative government.

Until Americans learn to fight their common enemy instead of each other, there is no reason to expect real change. We must put aside our differences to fight the imposition of a corporate New World Order if we are going to ensure that our children grow up in a rational, sustainable world where war is but a memory.